Building a Mud House

Paul works with a man, Eddie, that he has become good friends with. Eddie and his wife Norma have a full house with their five children, their eldest son’s wife, and Norma’s parents. They are in the process of building a home next to their own for her parents as they are elderly and can no longer completely take care of themselves.

House building here is quite a process, starting with the structure, then the roof, the mud walls, the floor, and lastly the doors and windows. Well, we offered to help build the mud walls and were summoned over. We headed over early in the morning only to find they’d already dug a hole to get the necessary dirt and were carrying it uphill in buckets. Their nine year-old son was helping too, dragging a water container by a rope with his share. The dirt was then dumped in the center of the house, a hold was made in the center, and water was poured in. Little Kevin who is only two came in and proclaimed, “House dirty!”

Then the men began mixing the dirt and water into mud using their feet. This is when Kevin said, in reference to his grandfather mixing mud, “Papi dirty!” Once the mud was made, we began shoving the largest handfuls we could carry in between the waddle supports. Waddle is just tree pieces that are used for building homes, fences, latrines, and whatever else you can think. At one point there were twelve people packing mud into the spaces. It was so much fun! We worked all morning, took a break for a lunch of rice, farine (hardened cassava pieces), and salt fish, and went back to work. By the end of the day I was so covered in mud that I had to scrub the caked on pieces from my arms.

Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home

Aren't they beautiful?  

Pears = Avocados

In our village, we just had pear season, and here pears are....

AVOCADOS!

These were free.  Amazing.

They taste almost identical to the avocados I ate back home but the pits are huge!

This is one of Paul's personal favorite photos.  I'm glad to make him laugh.

Day 200

August 25^th was our 200^th day in Guyana.

 We woke up to our neighbor, Lisa, announcing that there were toucans in our neighbors’ tree.  Sure enough, we went out there just in time to hear and see two toucans flying by into another set of mango trees.

We are constantly amazed by the beauty here, always finding something new to marvel at.  Today was toucans.

Can you see him in there?

Sometimes We Forget We Don't Have Children

Sometimes I feel like the pied piper, or the child whisperer.

Sun up to sun down children are coming to the house to read, color, jump rope, play with the soccer ball, draw, do a puzzle, chat, watch us cook, watch us clean, or just sit at the door.  They follow me to school.  They follow me home from school.  Thankfully they have yet to follow me to the latrine.

Child: "Miss.  You going where?

Me: "I'm going home"

Child: "Me go wit you."

Me: "Um, okay."

Sometimes they just stand at the door and stare.  That's always my favorite.  They stand at the door and you have no idea if they want something or not because sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. You just never know.  While they are staring you are waiting for them to get comfortable enough to speak.  You just have to wait until they are ready.  If they don't get the guts up they go home.

Otherwise it's:

"Miss, please for jump rope."

"Miss, I want to color."

"Miss, I want to borrow book."

"Miss, please for cup of water."

All of which are said with big grins.

I'm just too soft and have the hardest time saying no to those beautiful grins.  Consequently our house becomes so full of kids and surrounded by kids that we forget that we don't actually have any children of our own.

Bookshelf

No house of ours would ever officially be complete without a lot of books and an appropriate place to put them. For quite some time we have had the books, acquired from family, a bookstore in town and the ever so important Peace Corps office library, but have lacked the bookshelf, until now. I had been bothering Alyssa for a few months about the way she was storing the books at which she responded, “well, give me a better place to put them.” The challenge was set and I would have to say I feel like I met it. See picture below.

Since there is no Home Depot around for at least 3,000 miles I had to go with the traditional method of acquiring wood, the jungle. My friend Ediouldo told me one day that him and his son were going out the bush (jungle) to cut some wood with a chainsaw. So I purchased a few liters of gas and they cut about 5, 8ft boards of silver Bali wood for us. Unfortunately, once the wood is cut you have to get it out. So one day Eddie and I walked the four miles or so to the wood and carried my 5 boards plus his 12 about a quarter mile out of the bush and into the savannah to a place where a friend could pick it up with his truck.

I’m no stranger to hard work, but this was some of the hardest work I have ever done. Each board weighted at least 20 pounds, the terrain we had to walk was not stable and the it was at least 40 C (105 F or so). On top of that I had a fever the night before and was definitely not 100%. Bleh.

Once the wood was hauled out I had to cut each board to size and plane them. Yep, you guessed it, no electric planers here. My triceps still haven’t recovered from this endeavor. Once that was done all that was left was to nail it up, bring it inside and put books on it. Success!

Cassava Work

Cassava is the staple in our village.  Typically it is either made into cassava bread or dried out to make farine.  Either way, cassava work is a big process and something I want to learn.  The problem is that no one will let me help.  Thankfully other volunteers have expressed their difficulty in getting people in their village to accept them enough to help as well.  It’s as though they think we are too weak.  The fact that I’ve hiked to other villages doesn’t seem to make me any “stronger”.

I did, finally, get Auntie Norma to let me help with the farine work.  Granted, she only had me come to help peel and grate, but it’s a start.  They had already grated the first batch the day before and had it sitting to start to rot.  Half the farine is allowed to start rotting and then is mixed with the half that has not.

Most people have a separate cassava house outside of their own where they do all the work.  When I entered Auntie Norma’s cassava house, several of her children and her daughter-in-law were already peeling away.   I jumped in but definitely was not anywhere close to efficient.  Her oldest daughter, sitting to my right, was hacking away at cassava root after cassava root.  I just sat there watching for awhile, trying to get the hang of it.  I finally asked Auntie when the children start helping with the cassava work.  She said when they are five years-old.  I asked her if I was at least as good as a six year-old.  She laughed.

Here we are grating cassava.  The matapis are hanging on the wall behind me. 
In the foreground is the already peeled cassava waiting to be grated.

Their cassava house fits just the essentials needed for the work: a fireside oven, an industrial size kahari set on rocks (think of a witch’s brewing vat), matapis (a long cylindrical basket to drain the cassava – like an enormous Chinese finger trap), and her grater.  Usually the women grate by hand which takes days, but Uncle Eddie built a grater powered by pedaling a bicycle.  It saves a ton of time as usually the grater is nothing more than a punctured and rolled out milk tin nailed down to a wooden board.

To the left of me on the floor are the unpeeled pieces of cassava. 
The mess at our feet is all the peelings. 
The kahari is the large pot in the back left of the picture.

We peeled all of the cassava with nothing more than kitchen knives, then washed them in water and set them up for grating.  Their nine year-old son jumped on the bike first, his arms hanging onto a rope thrown over a wooden beam above him for balance, as Auntie Norma pushed the smaller pieces through the grater.  He only lasted five minutes before one of his older brothers jumped on.  Auntie started with the smallest pieces, some no bigger than a baby tomato, and used the larger pieces to push them through.  She grated for over an hour before I left for dinner and only had half done.

You can kind of see the grating machine in the back of the picture. 
The bicycle is hooked up to a milk tin punctured with holes to grate as it turns.  Genious.

One day I’ll go through the whole process, start to finish, and proudly blog about that as well.

Grannies

Paul and I have really enjoyed getting to know some of the “grannies” in the village.  That’s what everyone refers to them as, and there are two in particular that I want to tell you about.

One is Granny Teresa.  She’s a teeny little thing that has had several children of her own and raised a few orphaned children as well.  She has a beautiful smile that makes the corners of her eyes crinkle so much they practically close.  Not only is she incredibly kind, but she’s hilarious as well.  She graciously gave us our first chickens (which sadly were stolen soon after).  Unexpectedly early one morning, she came over to our house carrying the two chickens and introduced us to Jennie and her boyfriend Pedro.  Not just Jennie and Pedro, but Jennie and her boyfriend Pedro.  Another day we stopped by her house after a hike to just say hello but we should have known that there is no quick hello here.  We talked for the next hour about her children, her garden, and her house.  She was telling us about all of the fruit trees she’s planted in her yard over the years and that when she dies she knows that kids are going to just come in and steal the fruits.  That’s when she told us that she may just have to turn into a jumbee to scare them away!  A jumbee here is an evil spirit and the Amerindians take them very seriously, so to hear her say that was pretty funny and against the norm. 

The other is Granny Adela.  She lives “tillllllllllllll so” over the hill as she says, accentuating how far she lives from our house.  She stops by every time she passes to say hello, check on our garden, and see how our Makushi is going as she’s helping us learn some words and phrases. She’s not quite as little as Granny Teresa, but little nonetheless, carrying a rice sack full of goods by a strap on her forehead.  She’s incredibly difficult to understand and has a great laugh that shows off her one remaining tooth on the bottom right of her gums.  I don’t quite understand it, but that one tooth is so incredibly long that it makes me wonder what her other teeth looked like.

Call us Mr. and Mrs. Doolittle

Our home has gone from two to a zoo.

On any given day, our house contains and is surrounded by:

4 puppies

1 mama dog

A slew of neighbor dogs

4 chickens (Ours)

Horses

Donkeys

Lizards that climb our mud walls

Frogs in every crevice

The occasional cow

The occasional cat

Centipedes, scorpions, spiders and ants

And, on most days, a group of kids

Misunderstandings

Over the summer break, some men came into the village from a local organization that does a lot of good in Guyana assisting with food and resources.  They held a meeting to see how best to continue helping the village on top of what they are already doing.  I jumped into a discussion with some of the women who asked for my help as they really weren’t discussing much without a leader.  This is typical.  Free thinking is not exactly encouraged in the school, so asking an adult to do just that doesn’t always get you the results you were hoping for.

So, when the man came to facilitate and started asking questions, the answers were slow coming.  He asked why more people don’t donate their food surplus, why no one has started small animal rearing, and if anyone would donate money to the school kitchen. 

I wanted to scream.

 

This man was just doing his job, and he was doing it well, but I wanted to pause and tell him about the women he was speaking with.  These women work incredibly hard every day, often without much help from the men if any at all.  They’re so busy doing everything they can to feed and clothe their family.  There is no surplus, no money, no time.  The crops rot out this year.  There isn’t even always food for their own table, let alone to give.  No one is about to change their ways with the possibility of further loss.  No one here can afford that. 

I often wish that people from outside the village would spend more time here before they go making decisions on what is wrong, what is best, and what they’re going to do about each.